Handel opera presentation, past and present : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

What differences, if any, exist between the performance of Handel opera during his lifetime, and contemporary performances? To what extent do these differences reflect the need to adapt Handel's operas when performed out of their original context, and how does knowledge of original performance practices enhance the singer's ability to interpret and present characters in performance? This study investigates the ideas outlined above, exploring the social and cultural environment of opera seria, its conventions, and the way in which Handel's operas were presented during his lifetime, later providing a comparison with contemporary productions. It aims to enhance understanding of the production and musical aspects of staging a Handel opera, and to illustrate how this knowledge can assist in performance

Bringing transparency to financial reporting: towards an improved accounting framework in the aftermath of the credit crisis.

The credit crisis, amongst other things, is a crisis of confidence. What was once considered a problem limited to losses on US subprime mortgages has now spread throughout the global fi nancial landscape. A lack of understanding of where these losses have landed has resulted in a significant downturn in financial and economic activity. Confidence will only return once investors are satisfied that the true extent and location of these losses has been fully disclosed. For this to be achieved –despite siren calls the contrary– the financial system requires greater, not reduced levels of transparency and disclosure. The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is mindful of its responsibilities, and its work in conjunction with the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) is aimed at improving financial reporting in a number of key areas.

Signals of a Sneutrino (N)LSP at the LHC

The sneutrino is a viable candidate for the NLSP in SUSY spectra with gravitino LSP. In this work we study the collider implications of this possibility. In particular, we investigate whether the LHC can distinguish it (at least, in some cases) from alternative spectra, such as those with a neutralino LSP. We show that there exists a complete family of experimentally allowed and theoretically motivated spectra with sneutrino NLSP, which exhibit very distinctive multilepton signals that are difficult to fake within the MSSM. We study these signals in detail, including the techniques necessary to find them. We demonstrate our analysis approach on simulations incorporating backgrounds.Comment: 41 pages, 13 figures. V2: Tau-tau background added and background discussion in subsection V.C modified. Short discussion about early discovery in subsection V.D added. Minors changes and refs. adde

The Fate of Long-Lived Superparticles with Hadronic Decays after LHC Run 1

Supersymmetry searches at the LHC are both highly varied and highly constraining, but the vast majority are focused on cases where the final-stage visible decays are prompt. Scenarios featuring superparticles with detector-scale lifetimes have therefore remained a tantalizing possibility for sub-TeV SUSY, since explicit limits are relatively sparse. Nonetheless, the extremely low backgrounds of the few existing searches for collider-stable and displaced new particles facilitates recastings into powerful long-lived superparticle searches, even for models for which those searches are highly non-optimized. In this paper, we assess the status of such models in the context of baryonic R-parity violation, gauge mediation, and mini-split SUSY. We explore a number of common simplified spectra where hadronic decays can be important, employing recasts of LHC searches that utilize different detector systems and final-state objects. The LSP/NLSP possibilities considered here include generic colored superparticles such as the gluino and light-flavor squarks, as well as the lighter stop and the quasi-degenerate Higgsino multiplet motivated by naturalness. We find that complementary coverage over large swaths of mass and lifetime is achievable by superimposing limits, particularly from CMS's tracker-based displaced dijet search and heavy stable charged particle searches. Adding in prompt searches, we find many cases where a range of sparticle masses is now excluded from zero lifetime to infinite lifetime with no gaps. In other cases, the displaced searches furnish the only extant limits at any lifetime.Comment: 36 pages, 10 figures, plus appendix and reference

Density Perturbations in Chain Inflation

We consider the model of ``Chain Inflation,'' in which the period of inflation in our universe took the form of a long sequence of quantum tunneling events. We find that in the simplest such scenario, in which the tunneling processes are uniform, approximately 10^4 vacua per e-folding of inflation are required in order that the density perturbations produced are of an acceptable size. We arrive at this conclusion through a combination of analytic and numerical techniques, which could also serve as starting points for calculations with more general sets of assumptions.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures; v2: corrected typos, increased resolution on D=2+1 data point

Electroweak Splitting Functions and High Energy Showering

We derive the electroweak (EW) collinear splitting functions for the Standard Model, including the massive fermions, gauge bosons and the Higgs boson. We first present the splitting functions in the limit of unbroken SU(2)xU(1) and discuss their general features in the collinear and soft-collinear regimes. We then systematically incorporate EW symmetry breaking (EWSB), which leads to the emergence of additional "ultra-collinear" splitting phenomena and naive violations of the Goldstone-boson Equivalence Theorem. We suggest a particularly convenient choice of non-covariant gauge (dubbed "Goldstone Equivalence Gauge") that disentangles the effects of Goldstone bosons and gauge fields in the presence of EWSB, and allows trivial book-keeping of leading power corrections in the VEV. We implement a comprehensive, practical EW showering scheme based on these splitting functions using a Sudakov evolution formalism. Novel features in the implementation include a complete accounting of ultra-collinear effects, matching between shower and decay, kinematic back-reaction corrections in multi-stage showers, and mixed-state evolution of neutral bosons (gamma/Z/h) using density-matrices. We employ the EW showering formalism to study a number of important physical processes at O(1-10 TeV) energies. They include (a) electroweak partons in the initial state as the basis for vector-boson-fusion; (b) the emergence of "weak jets" such as those initiated by transverse gauge bosons, with individual splitting probabilities as large as O(30%); (c) EW showers initiated by top quarks, including Higgs bosons in the final state; (d) the occurrence of O(1) interference effects within EW showers involving the neutral bosons; and (e) EW corrections to new physics processes, as illustrated by production of a heavy vector boson (W') and the subsequent showering of its decay products.Comment: 67 pages, 12 figures; v2, published in JHEP, some expanded discussions and other minor revision